title: Mood and threat to attitudinal freedom: delineating the role of mood congruency and hedonic contingency in counterattitudinal message processing.
abstract: The present research examined when happy individuals' processing of a counterattitudinal message is guided by mood-congruent expectancies versus hedonic considerations. Recipients in positive, neutral, or negative mood read a strong or weak counterattitudinal message which either contained a threat to attitudinal freedom or did not contain such a threat. As expected, a freedom-threatening counterattitudinal message was more mood threatening than a counterattitudinal message not threatening freedom. Furthermore, as predicted by the mood-congruent expectancies approach, people in positive mood processed a nonthreatening counterattitudinal message more thoroughly than people in negative mood. Message processing in neutral mood lay in between. In contrast, as predicted by the hedonic-contingency view, a threatening counterattitudinal message was processed less thoroughly in positive mood than in neutral mood. In negative mood, processing of a threatening counterattitudinal message was as low as in positive mood. These findings suggest that message processing is determined by mood congruency unless hedonic considerations override expectancy-based processing inclinations.
authors.affiliation: Psychologisches Institut, Universität Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, Tübingen, D-72076, Germany. Rene.Ziegler@uni-tuebingen.de
authors.forename: Rene
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ziegler
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schlett
authors.forename: Arzu
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aydinli
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001290:Attitude; D005610:Freedom; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010565:Persuasive Communication; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: expectancies; hedonic contingency; message; mood; mood congruency; reactance; source; threat to freedom